Being in unconscious pain and having compassionate consideration of others are incompatible possibilities... which is why if we ever hope to "love our neighbor as ourselves" we must learn what it means to suffer consciously. Only then will we stop causing others needless suffering because, in the awareness of our own stress or sorrow, we would never add such heartache to anyone else.

In this short talk, Guy Finley talks about how the seeming "absence" of the divine is actually an invitation for us to draw inwardly nearer to that which never stops calling us.

Topics covered: The illusion of a separate self; There is a communication between levels of ourselves that we're not aware of; We're conditioned to believe in the power of choice; The first choice is to see the nature of the chooser; The more awakened you become the less choices you make; Fear is a lie because there's no one there who is apart from life to fear it...

In this Saturday discussion Guy speaks about true interior work and that when our work comes first we receive more revelation about what we run from and therefore revelation becomes what we seek.

Topics covered: Something in me wants to keep me in fear and humiliation; Why do I feel more negative during the holidays; Feeling like a fake; Resisting unwanted moments; How do I take the high road and forgive someone who hurt me; I want to help my family cope with the death of a loved one...

Show me the person who asks the least from him or herself -- who wishes to do only what must be done to get through their day -- and I'll show you a fledgling soul that denies herself, daily, the possibility of knowing just how much the Divine would gladly give to her if only she would learn to ask.

The real reason for our impatience is not the condition upon which we blame it: impatience -- along with its dark fraternal twin, frustration -- is born of our refusal to realize some present limitation and to remain conscious of it until it can be outgrown and transformed.

There is a part of us that is always trying to figure out what we have to do to be with what we love, instead of seeing that what we love is always with us now. If what we love is not with us now, then it is never with us. The sensation of longing has nothing to do with the love for which we long. Part of spiritual maturity is gradually outgrowing the need we have to be identified with things...

It is not the pain of the past that goes deeper, grows darker, becoming more intractable each time it’s revisited. Rather, this pain is the negative effect of an unconscious nature that loves to immerse itself in its own conditioned memory of that unwanted moment...

Until we awaken enough to see that within us lives the same nature as our "enemy" of the moment, we will never know the freedom or the forgiveness found in this great liberating truth: no enemy exists for us until the judge within us makes one so.

Topics covered: Student observations from practicing attention exercise regarding gratitude; There's no gratitude in familiarity; We live within fields of energy that are all connected; Resistance causes a collapse in the field of possibilities; Discussion of movie 'What Dreams May Come'; All that is in the dark must come into the light; You can't integrate the parts of you that you're afraid...

Topics covered:  What you call "your love" is sustained only as long as conditions seem to support that love. As soon as conditions change, what you called "love" is replaced with disdain, anxiety, fear, resentment, and hate; Take the fragments of Truth that you hear into your heart, and that Truth will lead you to the next Truth; When you dwell on an image, even an image of the Divine, you are without knowing it dwelling on the love of yourself.